I am not proving your points. We have drawn different conclusions from the same information. I agree that this is crony capitalism. Corporations are running the government. I would like to be free of the corporations. You would like to be free of the government.You’re only proving our points! … This is crony capitalism.
Well, then if the government is in power who do you think allows crony capitalism to exist? If the government actually focused on its intended responsibility of protecting rights equally and not showing favoritism then it would not have the chance to even allow crony capitalism.I am not proving your points. We have drawn different conclusions from the same information. I agree that this is crony capitalism. Corporations are running the government. I would like to be free of the corporations. You would like to be free of the government.
Re: subsidiarity. I am preparing my response to that question. I will post it here soon.
Maria, Amen can’t agree more. Socialism/Communism has never worked out.Socialism is great in theory but does not work in reality because we are imperfect human beings with a free will. We tried to rectify what we did to the black race by giving them affirmative action, entitlements, special scholarships for education, lowered the standards of colleges, police exams, and on and on and on. The only thing that resulted from that was another type of enslavement. By taking care of someone you take away their pride, their ingenuity, and keep them dependent on the caretaker. In the long run this fosters resentment and anger which they have no idea where it is coming from. Then instead of being gracious they need more and more entitlements and feel they are owed and still they are not happy. They are not happy because they need more, they are unhappy because they have no pride. Dependency is just another form of slavery. Socialism enslaves both the worker to whom money is taken from without their consent through taxation, and it enslaves the person whom becomes dependent on the stolen money. The only person who wins is the government officials who take power for life and have a great salary and benefits at the expense of the taxpayer. As long as they have the taxpayer to support them and the enslaved dependent to vote for them the politician wins. Social justice is just another name for Communism where we learn to rely on a government instead of ourselves and God for our survival. Charity should come from the heart, not from a government.
Quite likely worthless? Hardly.Cricket123
if it begins with the assumption that “the medical care system in the United States is the best in the world,” then it is quite likely worthless, as it has begun under a false premise. By most measures, our system is not the best in the world, just the most expensive.
]Quite likely worthless? Hardly.
Government “Health Care”, Dr William Luckey
June 20, 2009
“This week, both the president and his press secretary stated that there were countries where the people were completely satisfied with a “single payer” (i.e., socialist, government-run) medical system. When the press secretary was asked to name one, he could not.
“But a study by the Cato Institute has some very interesting data. Patients having to wait for more than four months for non-emergency surgery: Britain, 36%; Canada, 27 %; New Zealand, 26%; Australia, 23%; the United States, 5%. The elderly evaluate their health care way better in the UK than in either Canada or the United States. During a 12-month period, in Ontario, 71 patients died waiting for coronary bypass surgery. The United States also has the lowest hospital stay period compared to the other western socialist countries. Prostate cancer mortality rates among those diagnosed with the disease: UK, 57%; France, 49%; Germany, 44%; Australia, 35%; New Zealand 30%; Canada, 25%; and the United States, only 19%. Remember, this is under the current systems, which, in the US, is a free-market system, but in all the aforementioned other countries is a socialist system. (See cato.org/pubs/pas/pa532.pdf.) Do these other systems sound like ones where people are completely satisfied?”
[See http://www.drwilliamluckey.com/index.cfm/Current-Events
A false picture, because the source of the mortgage defaults in the first place was government meddling. As a source of the current subprime mortgage mess, economist Larry Kudlow and Wall Street Journal editorial board member Steve Moore point to the Carter-era law that purported to prevent “redlining” - denying mortgages to black borrowers - by pressuring banks to make home loans in “low and moderate-income neighborhoods.” Under the act, banks were to be graded on their attentiveness to the “credit needs” of “predominantly minority neighborhoods.” The higher a bank’s rating, the more likely that regulators would say yes when the bank sought to open a new branch or undertake a merger or acquisition. The two economists, speaking on Larry Judlow’s weekly radio show, noted how the CRA was the creation of the same liberal political establishment that is now blaming banks and Wall Street for the subprime mortgage crisis. (30/3/2008)Cricket1213
Dr. Luckey’s writings begin one step too late in the story of the housing bubble and misrepresent the nature of the agencies involved. So Luckey has left out the issue of why the Fed (also a private, for-profit bank) wanted to stimulate the housing market. The answer is, Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms had decided to inflate a bubble and make a killing, specifically through selling mortgage-backed securites and credit default swaps. Essentially, they were setting up securities that were designed to fail, betting both sides of the game, and making money coming and going.
From the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis:“The crisis has its roots in the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, a Carter-era law that purported to prevent “redlining” - denying mortgages to black borrowers - by pressuring banks to make home loans in “low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.”
This fella likes to categorize the crisis as the “sub-prime” crisis and fails to realistically categorize it as the “housing bubble”. He’s also cherry picking data from around 2004 where there was a lowering of initial commitments, but he ignores the historical and future commitments made. In doing so he is underemphasizing the resulting wave of effects that the CRA caused in its wake over it’s ENTIRE period of implementation.From the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis:
"In total, of all the higher-priced loans, only 6 percent were extended by CRA-regulated lenders (and their affiliates) to either lower-income borrowers or neighborhoods in the lenders’ CRA assessment areas, which are the local geographies that are the primary focus for CRA evaluation purposes. The small share of subprime lending in 2005 and 2006 that can be linked to the CRA suggests it is very unlikely the CRA could have played a substantial role in the subprime crisis…
…Another way to measure the relationship between the CRA and the subprime crisis is to examine foreclosure activity across neighborhoods that are classified by income. Data made available by RealtyTrac on foreclosure filings from January 2006 through August 2008 indicate that most foreclosure filings (e.g., about 70 percent in 2006) have taken place in middle- or higher-income neighborhoods. More important, foreclosure filings have increased at a faster pace in middle- or higher-income areas than in lower-income areas that are the focus of the CRA. (See Table 7.)…
…Two basic points emerge from our analysis of the available data. First, only a small portion of subprime mortgage originations is related to the CRA. Second, CRA-related loans appear to perform comparably to other types of subprime loans. Taken together, the available evidence seems to run counter to the contention that the CRA contributed in any substantive way to the current mortgage crisis."
Ample statistical tables are provided in the original should you wish to analyze the data yourself. 6 percent of subprime loans were extended under CRA. And this, of course, is limited to the subprime sector of the market. As a percentage of the total market, this is negligible. Furthermore, CRA requirements were weakened in 2004. Yet this tiny segment of the market has crashed the economy?
So you are suggesting we ignore the other 94% of subprime loans, or the pattern of defaults across the much larger total market. Feel free to reanalyze the data and show how this could possibly be so.
Why the housing crisis now? As I said before, “Wall Street firms had decided to inflate a bubble and make a killing, specifically through selling mortgage-backed securites and credit default swaps. Essentially, they were setting up securities that were designed to fail, betting both sides of the game, and making money coming and going.” This interpretation fits the facts.
Do you expect honesty about Wall Street from an editor of the Wall Street Journal?
I don’t think you understood my point - While yes, those are commitments the point is that the commitments(pursued through government involvement) drove the housing buble. As I said - “he is underemphasizing the resulting wave of effects that the CRA caused in its wake over it’s ENTIRE period of implementation.” I never said they weren’t comitments even though I would be correct in the fact that most commitments were met.Sorry, but do you even know what a “CRA dollar commitment” is?
A CRA “dollar commitment” is a pledge by a bank to “make available” some sum of money for lending under CRA. For example, “Wells Fargo has announced a community lending goal of $45 billion over 10 years, contingent upon the completion of a merger with First Interstate Bank.”
This money has not been, and in fact will probably never be lent. There is no requirement that a bank meet its goal, and there is no penalty if it does not. If a bank does not meet its stated goal, this will be “taken into account.” In practice, nothing happens. In fact, if a bank does not meet its goal, it may “commit” an even larger sum the next time it comes under any scrutiny, usually at the next merger. This makes little difference as it does not reflect any real financial obligation.
In addition, these “commitments” include all types of CRA loans: small business, commercial economic development, and others. Affordable housing/low income consumer loans are only a small part of these.
These “commitments” do not represent actual lending or any real financial obligation. The spikes in the graph are quite likely accounted for by periods of bank merger activity.
What are you saying “No” to anyways?No, geo, you got it from Steve Sailer. (Presumably because the images link to VDARE.)
No, you implied that you got it from your own research, when you just you Sailer’s sources.What are you saying “No” to anyways?
The second article is from the the chief credit officer at Fannie Mae in the 1980s and it shows that the article cricket posted is based upon doctored statistics made to fit a specific definition in order to come to a desired conclusion.
Want more of this? Vote for socialist policies.
I am not going to respond: this is not my outing. Now to continue the metaphor here:Here - from the horses mouth concerning loans into minority and lower income neighborhoods
Um, I showed you exactly where I got the info from. It’s all a direct quote from the article which is clearly linked.I don’t think you understood my point - While yes, those are commitments the point is that the commitments(pursued through government involvement) drove the housing buble. As I said - “he is underemphasizing the resulting wave of effects that the CRA caused in its wake over it’s ENTIRE period of implementation.” I never said they weren’t comitments even though I would be correct in the fact that most commitments were met.
From the **chief credit officer at Fannie Mae **in the 1980s- city-journal.org/2009/19_4_snd-cra.html
"To begin with, the CRA defenders’ claim that CRA lending mostly wasn’t subprime is highly misleading. It would be more accurate to say that 90 percent of CRA lending wasn’t classified as subprime. CRA lenders, along with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the two government-sponsored entities that bought loans from lenders, enabling them to make more loans—commonly classified CRA loans as “subprime” only if they contained such features as high fees, high rates, or low initial payments with adjustable interest rates. But approximately 50 percent of CRA loans for single-family residences were nevertheless made to borrowers who made down payments of 5 percent or less or had low credit scores—characteristics that indicated high credit risk. Whether or not anyone called these loans “subprime,” in other words, the chances are good that many of them have defaulted or remain at high risk of doing so.
Though the feds, again, haven’t collected figures for CRA loans’ performance as a whole, we do have statistics from a few lenders that are troubling indeed. In Cleveland, Third Federal Savings and Loan has a 35 percent delinquency rate on its CRA-mandated “Home Today” loans, versus a 2 percent delinquency rate on its non–Home Today portfolio. Chicago’s Shorebank—the nation’s first community development bank, with largely CRA-related loans on its books—has a 19 percent delinquency and nonaccrual rate for its portfolio of first-mortgage loans for single-family residences. And Bank of America said in 2008 that while its CRA loans constituted 7 percent of its owned residential-mortgage portfolio, they represented 29 percent of that portfolio’s net losses.
Whatever the precise magnitude of the CRA’s role, there is no question that as the government pursued affordable-housing goals—with the CRA providing approximately half of Fannie’s and Freddie’s affordable-housing purchases—trillions of dollars in high-risk lending flooded the real-estate market, with disastrous consequences. Over the last 20 years, the percentage of conventional home-purchase mortgages made with the borrower putting 5 percent or less down more than tripled, from 8 percent in 1990 to 29 percent in 2007. Adding to the default risk: of these loans with 5 percent or less down, the average down payment declined from 5 percent to 3 percent of the loan’s value.
As for Fannie and Freddie, most of the loans with 5 percent or less down that they had acquired by 2005 had down payments of 3 percent or even no down payment at all. From 1992 to 2007, the two entities acquired over $3.1 trillion in low-down-payment or credit-impaired loans and private securities backed by credit-impaired loans—and these are performing horribly: the delinquency rate on Fannie’s and Freddie’s remaining $1.1 trillion in such high-risk loans is 15.5 percent as of this past June 30, about 6.5 times the rate on the entities’ traditionally underwritten loans. All this risky lending, of course, drove the nation’s homeownership rate up and inflated a housing-price bubble."
Again I ask, Do you expect honesty about the fed and government from an economist for the fed?